Digital players, such as embedded media players or locally executed programs, serve content. Content may be video, audio, text, or combinations thereof. The content may be streamed via a network connection, such as the Internet. The content may be published by a third-party publisher or by various visitors to a content sharing service. The content sharing service may be a web site, an application, or any portal accessible via a network connection.
Multiple services may serve content. In order to generate revenue, the services may augment the serving of content with shared content. Shared content may be any content served in-stream with content already being served to a visitor to a content sharing service. The shared content may be sourced from a seller of goods or services, and provide additional information about the goods or service. The shared content may include meta data, and in response to being clicked-through, the shared content may redirect the consumer of content to a third-party service or site.
The shared content may be sourced from an online shared content network. The shared content may be sourced from videos internally generated by the online shared content network, or provided by a third-party publisher.
Due to the existence of multiple content sharing services, and various digital content players, the introduction of shared content may become difficult. Various content sharing services may agree to rely on a singular format for introducing in-stream shared content. For example, the various content sharing services may employ an extended markup language (XML) schema that allows in-stream digital content sharing over multiple formats and players to become possible.
Thus, if a content sharing service supports the XML schema described above, the content sharing service may serve in-stream shared content via multiple sources with ease.